Thursday 24 February 2011 19.05 EST
First published on Thursday 24 February 2011 19.05 EST

John le Carré's gift of his papers to the Bodleian library in Oxford is a welcome relief from the familiar headlines reporting the sale abroad of yet another great collection. Preserving original manuscripts can seem like a luxury in an era of austerity. But to be able to trace the way plot and character have evolved in novels which, as Timothy Garton Ash suggested, have become a part of the history of the times in which they are set, is an invaluable legacy. The well-endowed libraries of North America like Atlanta's Emory University which has – among many treasures – Salman Rushdie's papers, operate under none of the constraints that limit acquisitions here. The costly sequence of conserving, cataloguing and digitising means collections can only be taken on if they are fashionable enough to attract funding. That can sometimes make it impossible to accept less-obviously important bequests. Oxford's Bodleian, the new home of Le Carré's papers, has a frozen back-list that they cannot afford to catalogue, and the principle source of government support for acquisitions, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, had its funding halved last year. Even so, both the Bodleian and the British Library have extraordinary collections of historic documents available on line by which you may turn the pages of the draft score of the Messiah or study the detail of the Tyndale Bible as if you were holding a magnifying glass over the page. Like castles and cathedrals, manuscripts should be recognised for what they are – part of history.